Empty Access-A-Ride Vehicles

MYFOXNY.COM - New York City's Access-A-Ride: Empty vans with no passengers, crisscrossing boroughs. Lots and lots of down time. Sleeping drivers with engines running.

And you pay for it all.

The federally mandated program is a scheduling nightmare. The number of people using it is skyrocketing. with thousands more a year becoming eligible because their disability prevents them from taking the subway or bus.

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More than 20,000 people use the system each week -- that's 40,000 trips back and forth. The rules say each passenger has to be picked up within 30 minutes of their scheduled time -- all this in the middle of New York City traffic.

NYC Transit, part of the MTA, is in charge of scheduling the pickups, but several private companies are contracted to provide the transportation and drivers, who can have lots of down time depending on the schedules they get.

One driver told Fox 5: "You get breaks, you get a lot of breaks… breaks will be like sometimes they're 20 minutes, sometimes they're an hour two hours… sometimes you get a three- or four-hour lunches. It all depends on the gap in your route."

You might remember a guy from a story Fox 5 did in November. We caught him snoozing for an hour with the engine running outside a dialysis center, as people waited for their scheduled Access-A-Ride trip.

"I'm waiting one hour 45 minutes every day, a problem," one patient's wife grumbled.

When we woke up the driver, he said he was waiting on a passenger. Eventually he left with no passenger -- empty for an hour and a half.

Latest figures have the Access-A-Ride program costing the public more than $451 million a year.

Each trip is $66. That's way more expensive then most limo services. People who qualify only pay $2.25 per trip. That's the normal subway and bus fare for door-to-door service by appointment.

The vans are designed to hold up to 2 wheelchairs and 5 people, but usually they only have one person at a time and put in lots of miles with no one in side.

"Yeah, we don't go full," a driver told Fox 5. "I came from Staten Island empty to pick up one person and go back to Staten Island."

The companies supplying the rides rake in $346 million a year for the hours the vehicles are on the road. That includes the time we caught drivers sleeping, getting lost, and parked with their engines running.

Jim Weisman is an attorney for the United Spinal Association. He has been fighting for the rights of the disabled for more than 30 years.

"I think Access-A-Ride is run by people who are committed and dedicated to providing transportation to people with disabilities, but have an almost impossible job," Weisman says. "It's a mess and it will stay a mess and it will get worse as people who used to die younger live longer and need transportation services."

Weisman says it would help if the city made all subways and cabs accessible along with encouraging the disabled to use mass transit.

Transit officials say almost all of the down time Fox 5 saw was due to scheduled meal breaks, passengers not showing up, and vans strategically waiting in position to pick up passengers up on time.

Officials say they are trying to make things more efficient. In fact, they are spending millions of dollars on a new computerized system to help with the scheduling.

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